1. Captain Leonard Frank Plugge was a British radio entrepreneur and Conservative Party politician.
14 Facts About Leonard Plugge
1. 2.
Leonard Plugge was educated at Dulwich College, the University of Brussels and University College London, where he graduated with a BSc degree in civil engineering in 1915.
3.
Leonard Plugge stayed with the air force until 1921, and in the same year was elected a Fellow of the Royal Aeronautical Society.
4.
Leonard Plugge was elected Member of Parliament for Chatham in 1935, defeating the Labour candidate Hugh Gaitskell by a majority of 5,897 votes.
5.
Leonard Plugge lost in 1945 to Arthur Bottomley, a future Minister of Overseas Development in Harold Wilson's first government.
6.
Leonard Plugge created the International Broadcasting Company in 1931 as a commercial rival to the British Broadcasting Corporation by buying airtime from radio stations such as those of Normandy, Toulouse, Ljubljana, Juan les Pins, Paris, Poste Parisien, Athlone, Barcelona, Madrid and Rome.
7.
On one such journey, Leonard Plugge asked the cafe owner at the Cafe Colonne, located in the coastal village of Fecamp, Normandy, what there was to see in the town.
8.
Leonard Plugge went to see Fernand Le Grand and offered to buy time to broadcast programmes in English.
9.
The first presenter was a cashier from the National Provincial Bank's Le Havre branch named William Evelyn Kingwell, whom Leonard Plugge had met when drawing cash after leaving Le Grand.
10.
Kingwell fell ill and Leonard Plugge brought in new announcers, including Max Staniforth and Stephen Williams, and later Bob Danvers-Walker and general manager-cum-presenter David Davies, who, after the war, became station manager and managing director of the English-language 'offshore' broadcaster, LM Radio, Mozambique, from 1947 to 1969.
11.
The power of the transmitter increased after Leonard Plugge convinced film studio and 280-strong cinema chain owner Gaumont British, owner of the Sunday Referee, an entertainment-based Sunday newspaper to sponsor him and print Radio Normandy's schedule.
12.
Leonard Plugge hoped to restart transmissions from France after the war but changes in broadcasting regulations and a different attitude to radio listening meant that this never happened.
13.
Leonard Plugge moved to Hollywood, California in 1972, and died there on 19 February 1981 at the age of 91.
14.
Captain Leonard Plugge married Ann Muckleston in New York on 28 October 1935, a little over two weeks before he was elected to the House of Commons.